Truebill's CEO discovered he was being charged for a monthly security service at a house he didn't live in. Now his startup raised $15 million and is moving to DC.

Truebill

Truebill cofounder and CEO Haroon Mokhtarzada

• Truebill, a financial management app that tracks spending, subscription charges, and credit scores, announced it raised $15 million in Series B funding on Wednesday.
• Truebill cofounder and CEO Haroon Mokhtarzada wanted to improve upon Mint, a popular budgeting app acquired by Intuit, when he realized he was being charged for a security service on a house he no longer lived in.
• Many other fintech startups specialize in a specific area of finances, like investments or savings, but don't offer a comprehensive overview of finances. Instead, many have focused on an "arms race" to own customers' relationships with traditional banks, Mokhtarzada said.
• It remains to be seen whether customers will be receptive to new services from other startups that have built entire companies on very specific offerings, like Robinhood, he said. Mint was a good example, but stopped innovating on its product after the Intuit acquisition, he said.
• Mokhtarzada founded Truebill with his brothers and went through Y Combinator's notable accelerator program, but has since moved the startup's headquarters to Washington, DC, to help with hiring and employee retention.
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Fintech startups have long dreamed of replacing traditional banks, but a new company on the block thinks it has an even smarter solution to total financial domination.

Truebill is an app that helps users monitor and manage their finances, not wholly dissimilar to the manual budgeting spreadsheets of simpler times. But in 2019, Truebill does the manual labor for you, including alerting you to recurring charges for long-forgotten subscriptions. That feature alone was worth more than $2 million, the amount Truebill raised in seed funding in 2016, when the company was fresh out of startup accelerator Y Combinator.

On Wednesday, the 3-year old startup added another $15 million in Series B funding to its balance sheet. The round was led by Eldridge Industries with participation from Evolution VC, Cota Capital, Lucas Venture Group, and YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim.

"A lot of these startups get traction by solving specific issues, but that doesn't solve the problem of looking at your finances holistically," Truebill cofounder and CEO Haroon Mokhtarzada told Business Insider. "We wanted to find out, 'what is the Calm for your finances?'

Read More: Galileo, the profitable 'best-kept secret in fintech,' is raising $77 million in its first-ever venture-capital deal after 19 years of bootstrapping

As Mokhtarzada tells it, budgeting app Mint was a user-favorite that was almost, but not quite, the solution long before Truebill entered the scene. But after the app was acquired by software giant Intuit, updates stalled and users left the service in droves without a viable replacement.

With the abundance of other niche fintech services, Mokhtarzada saw the opportunity to step in with a bank-agnostic software tool that could replace Mint. Now, Truebill works with most banking and credit providers, including online-only companies like Chime, and other fintech startups like investing app Robinhood. He's betting that customers won't trust smaller providers like Robinhood to move into more comprehensive services, and will instead want a service provider that isn't trying to upsell them on a debit card or hot stock of the day.

"Everything is an arms race to that direct banking relationship," Mokhtarzada said. "Everyone can go fight over that and we can work on this."

Born out of subscription fatigue

Mokhtarzada had just wrapped up his first business when he started looking for new opportunities. He always had "the entrepreneurial bug," he said, and was always trying to convince those around him to take a leap of faith.

In a mixture of his own poor financial management and acute business sense, Mokhtarzada wrote a program to check for recurring charges on his credit card. Turns out he had been paying monthly for a security service on a home he no longer lived in. He told his brothers, with whom he had started and sold his previous company.

"All of us found something we didn't want to be paying for," Mokhtarzada said.

Since then, Truebill has expanded from a recurring charge monitoring tool to a whole host of financial management tools, including credit score reporting and a rewards program just launched Wednesday.

"It can't work if you are looking at it through a periscope," Mokhtarzada said. "And as more things move to subscriptions, it gets more and more unwieldy to manage and stay on top of it."

Another Silicon Valley exodus

As the team has expanded, Mokhtarzada said talent is getting more difficult to attract and retain at the startup's San Francisco headquarters. Although the company was started in Mountain View at Y Combinator and met a large portion of its early investors at Demo Day, the company was ready to move on, he said.

"Hiring in San Francisco became increasingly difficult, and was ultimately more difficult than we anticipated," Mokhtarzada said. "A great candidate has a lot of offers and so you're competing with other companies, the cost of living is higher, and it's harder to retain people."

Effective Wednesday, Truebill's headquarters will effectively be in its new Washington, DC office, Mokhtarzada said. Although open positions will be posted as located in either location, and the San Francisco office will remain open, Mokhtarzada said the move was necessary for the company's long-term growth.

"As a tech company in DC, we are one of the most exciting employers in the region," Mokhtarzada said. "Our close rate is actually really high because we are really cool compared to what else is out there."